Journey five to the visa office is underway and everything is in order, as the title of this post translates. The purpose of this visit is to prove to the Germans that if my life crumbles into a million pieces then they won’t be fiscally responsible for paying my rent – not joking.

To prove this, I had to open a Sperrkonto, a type of savings account with strict limits on how much one can draw from it. It wasn’t enough to show that we had enough money to pay for a year’s worth of rent in Euros in a German bank, but we had to have it in this specific type of account. Ironically, we pay our rent from our US bank and we pay in dollars.

The bank was very confused in general because I didn’t fully understand and accurately articulate my needs, but they were also…